A day after getting back home from Norway, I took off for Whistler, British Columbia (taking my Scandinavian jetlag with me) to attend the Mozilla Summit. In case you haven’t heard yet, here’s a brief summary of the various adventurous goings on: on Day 1, a traveler with worse jet lag than me saw a black bear rummaging through garbage; on Day 2, the Sea to Sky Highway collapsed, leaving us stranded atop the beautiful glacier park; on Day 3, the power went out in the conference hotel. I opted out of the 8 hour bus drive back to Vancouver, and chose to circumvent the rock slide via sea plane It was just… splendid. I documented the whole thing in my Moz08 Flickr set.

I gave two talks at the summit — one on standards (links to my slides and a blog post summarizing what we talked about), and one with Seth Bindernagel on Firefox in India, my particular passion. The India discussion occured on Day 3, when there was no power in the hotel. So, a group of interested parties huddled around my laptop in a semi-circle, and we had a small, intimate and dimly lit discussion in a small room about fonts, the Indian government’s e-governance initiatives, and the propagation of standards-based platforms. I had a deja vu moment when I realized that so many problems with the top Indian sites reminded me of the early era of callow markup, when the evangelism team was first constituted. Seth and I are going to talk to major Indian ISVs about Mozilla, and plan some workshops to coincide with foss.in in November. India is like the new old frontier of the Web; proprietary stuff (like MSHTML particularities and Microsoft’s Dynamic Fonts) still permeate the marketplace. At the same time, the comScore data about India tells us that it has “one of the fastest growing Internet populations.” It is high time Mozilla did something there.

See what I mean by eventful two weeks? Scandinavia and the Canadian Rockies, all for the Web.

But let’s talk about the web platform. Stagnant, really? Innovation at Mozilla ultimately manifests itself as innovation for the web platform. Let’s leave the intricacies of the standards process for another discussion — it isn’t ideal, and big questions about consortia (like W3C and ECMA) are probably valid ones. Great ideas are vetted for interoperability in forums such as the WHATWG, and the W3C’s WebApps WG, and we browser vendors deliver as rapidly as feasible on implementations (some are slower than others — you know who you are). Both IE8 Beta and Firefox 3 now support postMessage, for example, so talk of AJAX methodologies being stagnant ought to be revisited. And support of Canvas2D in browsers such as Opera, Safari, and Firefox results in stellar innovations such as processing.js, which — any “open platform” chauvinism on my part notwithstanding — gives Flash a royal run for its money.

Mozilla’s involvement in standards encompasses enhancements to JavaScript, graphics, and APIs for new capabilities. Below is a breakdown of the work that will eventually be a part of the web platform. Don’t stop and stare for too long — there is nothing stagnating here

Sometimes, what goes around does come around. I first started playing with Mozilla, a project launched by Netscape Communications, in 1998. That was a whopping ten years ago. I was in Bangalore, fresh out of college, and had finished a stint in Rajasthan as a substitute French teacher to dilute the effects of four years of undergraduate mathematics and computer science. Hiatus aside, grad school or profession or professional gadabout? The technology industry came calling with its dubious promises of intriguing work and the potential to travel (and a free cafeteria to eat in, and a free Internet connection), and Bangalore was the place to be, with its nascent information technology subculture.

Something stuck, because by early 2001, I was working for Netscape as Technology Evangelist on Mozilla. Continue reading →

Taboca (aka Marcio Galli aka Syncope) e-mailed a bunch of us with characteristic gusto about his Pink Paula Theme, “just in time for Valentine’s Day.” Hah! In an act of romance and impromptu bravado, our favorite Brazilian gifted his girlfriend Paula a pink theme for Firefox, all her own. When Firefox 2.0 shipped, she obliged him to tweak the skin to work with the latest release, and then he decided to release his work to the masses. Roses are red …

Honestly, this made my day. Taboca’s also behind CCPhotos, part of his master plan of digitizing the known (Cartesian) world. Ah, life, life, life.